Faculty

Philip Deslippe is a historian of American religion with a background in American Studies and literature. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he is writing a dissertation on the early history of yoga in the United States from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Philip has published articles on the history of modern yoga in academic journals such as the Journal of Yoga Studies, Amerasia, and Sikh Formations, and in popular venues including Yoga Journal, Air and Space Smithsonian, and the Indian news site Scroll.

He has presented his work at several dozen academic conferences, given guest lectures for courses at Stanford, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara, and has been a lecturer for the teacher training program at Avalon Yoga in Palo Alto, California for the last five years. He served as a historical and archival consultant and an on-camera subject matter expert on Kundalini Yoga and the Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization (3HO) for the 2024 docuseries Breath of Fire on HBO Max, and am co-creator and co-host of Temple of Steal, an unofficial companion podcast to Breath of Fire on Axis Mundi Media with Stacie Stukin. His writing has been translated into Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Turkish.

Courses taught: 

• YS 102 | Modern Yoga in the West

Selected Publications: 

• 2023. "Doctorji the Divorcé: Understanding Bhagat Singh Thind through his Marriage to Inez Buelen." Ethic Studies Review, Special Issue: One Century After Thind. 46, 1-2: 52-68. https://doi.org/10.1525/esr.2023.46.1-2.52
• 2022. "Fakir: How a Word from India Moved Through American Popular Culture for Nearly a Century." In The United States And South Asia From The Age Of Empire To Decolonization: A History of Entanglements, ed. Harald Fischer-Tiné and Nico Slate, 69-81. Leiden University Press. 
• 2021. "Past the Pejorative: Understanding the Word “Cult” Through Its Use in American Newspapers During the Nineties." Implicit Religion (195-217). https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.0000
• 2020. "Anglophone Yoga and Meditation Outside of India." In  the Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies, co-authored with Suzanne Newcombe, 350-355. Routledge. 
• 2018. "The Swami Circuit: Mapping the Terrain of Early American Yoga." Journal of Yoga Studies (5-44). 
• 2016. "Rishis and Rebels: The Punjabi Sikh Presence in Early American Yoga." Journal of Sikh & Punjab Studies, 23(1&2). 
• 2014. "The Hindu in Hindoo: Fake Yogis, Pseudo-Swamis, and the Manufacture of African American Folk Magic. Amerasia Journal 40:1 (2014): 35-56.